IN THEIR MORE companionable daytime moments Abe and Kirsty talked of getting a cat. They talked of different types and colours of cat, and chose a short list of names. Those were good conversations. Then Abe was given two fish in a tank as a late house-warming present and they postponed the cat plan. The fish started off in Abe’s bedroom – swimming there – but it was stuffy under the roof and the water evaporated too fast. The plants went brown and slimy. Abe either overfed the fish or forgot to feed them at all. He breathed dope over them. Kirsty felt sorry for them and brought them downstairs. They lived happily in her cool kitchen from then on and made beautiful moving shadows on the blue walls.
Nothing much happened with the fish, apart from the ritual of catching them in the net and flipping them into the glass salad bowl, in order to clean the tank. On these occasions Kirsty filled up the bowl with tepid tap water so as not to give them a shock. They swam round and round, bored and shitting, unaware of the lettuce and vinaigrette they were replacing. It wasn’t much of a holiday, more of an endurance test – for her, as well as for them. Once they came downstairs, they were her responsibility, though Abe still referred to them as his. Remembering the goldfish in her primary school, Kirsty fed them every morning before she put the kettle on for a cup of tea. She made a few smacking kissing noises and said good morning. Sometimes she sang to them in her clear voice. They could listen if they wanted to. She topped up their water, pouring it from a jug into a saucer held under the surface, so that the gravel at the bottom wouldn’t be disturbed. And she cleaned the tank. She had enough to do without the fish, but they were alive and she didn’t want them to die. She was rather resentful of the time they took up – though it wasn’t a lot – and, in the way of things, this meant they took up more time, both the time itself and the time spent feeling resentful, which didn’t necessarily, or usually, coincide.
Since splitting up with Luka, Kirsty had become more solitary. She no longer met up with her friends several times a week. ‘I love you, Kirst. You don’t piss around, like the rest of us,’ Marlene said. ‘I really admire that. Let me be the first to hear your new songs when you’re ready.’ Kirsty wasn’t. She wished Marlene wouldn’t mention new songs. There was only one and it didn’t exist. In her free time Kirsty walked around the side streets or to one of the nearby parks, Roundwood, Brondesbury, Gladstone. She liked their sturdy names. She went, not to orientate herself, but to see her surroundings while they were still strange, because that moment never comes again. The early spring weather was gloomy but she enjoyed those walks. The leaves that had fallen in the autumn were still piled up on the pathways. They looked crisp and old. Kirsty couldn’t match any of these parks to the one that Neil had taken them to when they were little. It was always ‘the park’ and they went in Neil’s car. He drove fast through streets lined with small houses, as if he knew for certain that there would be no children or cats playing there. She must have been nervous, because once they had run over an old grey raincoat and she had screamed and screamed. Neil had pulled in to the kerb and turned the engine off – had just sat there. Abe, in the back of the car, hadn’t said a word. When she was quiet, Neil had said calmly, looking straight ahead, ‘Don’t ever make that noise in my car again. Do you want to cause a fucking accident?’
She remembered that the park toilets were embedded in a tall dark hedge and that the floor of the Ladies, where she had to go without Abe, was always flooded with oily-looking water. The toilet paper was reduced to a cardboard roll and the basin was untouchable. There was a playground slide with a glass-smooth finish and sides that were sharp enough to cut your hands on, if you held on to them on the descent. The see-saw was broken. Permanently up – or down – depending how you looked at it. Kirsty was disappointed with herself for not remembering more and wondered what else she had forgotten.
As she often had to work on Saturdays, Kirsty rarely had two free days in a row. Single days off were precious so she guarded them. Sometimes she guarded them so closely that nothing happened. Sometimes she felt lonely. She had received four or five text messages from Luka since they had split up and, as none of them sounded desperate, she had decided to ask him over. Sunday lunch would be best, she thought. Kirsty offered Luka a few dates and he accepted the first available.
He turned up on the doorstep with a bottle of wine. There were three buses backing up from the traffic lights, juddering and burning up diesel oil outside the house, so Kirsty didn’t quite catch what he said after he’d said hello. Luka kissed her on the cheek. His face was damp and cold. He felt alien – even exotic – and she wondered how it would feel to have his face next to hers every day, forgetting for an instant that, until recently, she had done. Kirsty closed the door behind him and the buses showed red through the ridged glass.
As soon as they were in the kitchen, Kirsty opened the bottle. She had done some of the preparation in advance – chopping up the peppers and making a salad dressing; there was only the chicken to grill. She turned on the extractor fan over the stove and the noise was a refuge for her because she didn’t have to talk or to listen to the silence. She could pretend that she and Luka were friends and the extractor fan was on.
She said the food was ready. They sat at the kitchen table at right angles to each other – a jug full of daffodils between them – the brightest thing in the room – and the talk didn’t flow, in spite of the wine, which by then was almost gone. Kirsty had made an orange polenta cake and asked Luka if he’d like a cup of coffee with it but he said no, he’d rather not wake up. He had a cigarette instead. He fiddled around making a roll-up, scattering shreds of tobacco on the floor, then went over to the creaky sash window and forced it wide open because he knew Kirsty didn’t like smoking indoors. The room became cold in a few minutes and the warm citrus smell of the cake drifted away. Luka rested his wrists on the frame and blew smoke into the garden. Upstairs, the front door slammed and Kirsty heard the bump bump of bicycle wheels on the steps. She sat at the table, staring at Luka’s back, wishing she hadn’t turned down Abe’s invitation to Sunday lunch in a pub.
‘Shall we go for a walk?’ she said.
‘If you want,’ Luka said.
They went to Roundwood Park. Luka walked on the kerb side and kept his hands in his pockets. He was wearing his oldest trainers and a pair of tartan socks that Kirsty hadn’t seen before. There had been repairs to the gas pipes the previous week. The pavement had been dug up and put back haphazardly, leaving seams of tarmac in sticky footpaths. About halfway up the street, a pigeon landed a metre or so in front of them and carried on wobbling fast ahead like an automaton, as if it had forgotten it could fly.
‘Are the birds round here thick or something?’ Luka said. He lunged forward and stamped his foot. Kirsty yelped. The pigeon raised itself off the ground with a few flaps and veered into the road as a car was passing. Kirsty shut her eyes. She felt the squelch but when she dared to look she saw the pigeon alive and pecking in the gutter.
As soon they were inside the park gates, Kirsty wished they had gone somewhere else. Roundwood Park wasn’t a place you could get lost in, but she saw at a glance that it had shrunk since she had last been there.
‘Do you like it here?’ Luka said.
‘Yes,’ she said, rallying. ‘I do. It’s a perfect curve – like a microcosm of the earth’s surface.’
The park was surrounded by low houses and backed on to two cemeteries – the Willesden New Cemetery and the Jewish Reformed Cemetery – but the rounded hill was special. The top of the curve was marked out by a circle of trees and through them, looking westwards, you could see the tilting structure of the new Wembley Stadium arch and the tower blocks of Neasden. Kirsty liked the view, which wasn’t of great interest and would never have appeared on a calendar. She liked the bland horizon and all the ordinary houses stretching towards it.
Luka nodded, though not in response to her answer. He nodded as if he were very wise and she had confirmed something detrimental to her that he already knew. His eyes didn’t look wise, though. They looked belligerent.
Kirsty and Luka made a single circuit of the park, which took about ten minutes, then Luka said he was going to find the tube station. He headed off in the wrong direction, his collar up, his hands in his pockets, but Kirsty didn’t call after him.
I made him like that, she thought, as she walked back to Iverdale Road. There was nothing horrible about him and now there is. He was the type who would have gone on, for years, being all right, neither better nor worse, like a packet of sugar at the back of the cupboard. She had met him at a former cinema in New Cross. She was singing in a charity event, dressed in a low-cut black T-shirt and a bronze-coloured tiered skirt that had once belonged to Gloria. He had been at the front, checking the bags for bombs and weapons. It was a joke, really, peering between the lipsticks and condoms and paper hankies. By the time she came out, at the end of the concert, dressed in her usual clothes, with Gloria’s skirt in a Tesco bag, everyone had gone home. There was only the sound of the wind and the pre-Christmas traffic toiling back from the West End. Luka was there, sitting on a concrete bollard, waiting. Kirsty asked him if he’d found anything suspicious in the bags and he said only a small landmine. It hadn’t seemed worth making a fuss about it, he said, spoiling everyone’s evening. ‘It was a good concert, though,’ he said. ‘I liked it.’ She asked him what he liked about it and he smiled.
He had come all the way from Croatia to London, leaving his mother alone in Zagreb. His family had seen worse things than ever turned up in bags at London concerts. Kirsty felt – although Luka wasn’t, ultimately, or even in the short term, her responsibility – that rejecting him was a breach of hospitality. There were no words she could say – none that were safe – to make him himself again, though she knew what they were, the unsafe ones.